Yeah, I think when people are getting hundreds, or thousands of channels cheaper from some off-brand name, or from a referral from a bloke down the pub, they know what's what.

It's like buying something from the local market, those Adidas trackies are either a knock-off copy, or knocked-off stolen, but if they're 1/4 the price then they're still going to sell to someone.

The only thing I'd point out is that a security researcher found that a significant number of those grey market pirate boxes they tested had malware on them. So using them can open you up to a whole lot of risk. After all, there's no accountability for those pirates!

As someone in the media technology business, it's very frustrating for me that the pirate streaming industry has co-opted the name IPTV for it's offerings.

But it's not the articles that are driving it, it's the pirates themselves who have done it and the articles following that nomenclature. If you go online the search results for IPTV are very much about pirate services and tools now.

In the previous work I was involved in, I was responsible for technical measures against piracy and had to get comfortable with the services being called IPTV.

YouTube channel DextersTechLab was looking at a piece of retro tech, an interface box for an early broadcast painting system, it acts as a kind of hub for serial tablet, "rat" and other devices. It was built on an x86 microprocessor, some SDRAM and an EEPROM.

Mark gave me the ROM image, I tried using more conventional decompiling methods but the chips were exotic enough that I didn't get good results and as a last resort, I put it into Claude raw. Claude was actually able to parse the binary and sort of decompile it. It was able to tell me what the ports did and what the interfacing protocols were.

It then started making stuff up, clearly trying to impress me, but after a few rounds of reprimanding it and saying how making stuff up wasn't helpful, Claude stuck to facts.

A somewhere over 10 years ago a certain Linux distro company commissioned a company I worked for to make a TV specific distro. The team built something amazing, as a DVR it would have been better than anything on the market. Think people who professionally build software for millions of TVs and STBs for years, getting told they can do anything they need to in order to build a Linux based, open-source focused distro for TVs/STBs/DVRs.

Then that well known distro company realised they couldn't get any TV company to actually license it. So they abandoned the project and asked us to remove their name from it. We then went out to the market and tried to sell it to the TV and STB manufacturers. Europe, Japan, USA, China, we visited everyone we could. I met with so many companies you'd recognise. We couldn't get anyone to license it.

We considered just releasing it, but it needed tidying up and the Distro company still had an option on it, but we didn't get an adequate answer on releasing it for free.

Eventually, under the burden of building something no one wanted to pay for, the company got sold to a Russian company for not enough. And the code was effectively lost inside that organisation.

Writing a distro for smart TVs is harder than you'd think. MStar, who makes >90% of the chipsets, has their own version of GStreamer which is not quite compatible and quite outdated (last time I was involved). Managing the lifecycle of apps in a resource constrained environment with a lean-back experience (e.g. no mouse and keyboard), requires experience. Almost all consumers want Android/AppleTV levels of simplicity, not ArchLinux with a full screen browser.

So it's good when people who know what they're doing maintain the software that goes into TVs.

But getting organisations to pay for the support and development is hard. Especially when TVs are horrifically unprofitable for most companies. And that's the key part that most people don't understand. When I was working on this strategy, most companies had 9 months to make any profit on a new TV model before the market put price pressures enough that each unit sold wasn't helping. TVs have become ridiculously cheap in the past 20 years, and every extra penny the manufacturers spend hurts their bottom line.

Ultimately, this is one of the reasons why TV manufacturers are always looking for new ways of making money (like adverts in menus), because TVs aren't a profitable business to be in. Notice how large screen PC monitors are usually much more expensive than the comparable TV but with less tech?

There's an elder gentleman I talk to in my village, I'm not sure how old he is but well over 70. He worked for old IBM in the 60s.

He's still doing a little coding for charities and he's now loving using AI.

There's very little margin in pure CDN products right now, so they're likely only making money on the value add products. Any money from CDNs is likely going back into maintenance, upgrading and growth.

There's a fine line, reduce quality too far and customer satisfaction drops. Some customers will have a higher tolerance to dropping quality than others, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.

So you do studies, you look at the impact of quality changes to customer churn and then you move the line appropriately.

Marketing emphasizing 4K helps reduce this.

It depends on which vendor they're using.

It generally occurs as patterns which are slightly in the noise. Good systems pick locations where its easier to hide and turn it off when the scene would expose it. Usually when badly done increasing sharpness in a scene can help reveal it.

Basically, if you can damage the watermark the picture quality is bad enough that it's harming your viewing. You need to compress into crap SD quality to make it hard to detect and even then you'll get something.

You don't even need a complete pattern, if you can get enough fragments you can narrow down the possible identities until you have a high match probability. I.e. partial fingerprints or DNA match.

It was 1999 I think, I was doing a placement at a media company. One of the PAs was heavily pregnant, an old guy in the office said to her "My my Jane, your breasts are coming along nicely."

WTF!

My SIL, this week(!) was told by her supervisor that if she tries to apply for another team and doesn't get that job, she'll be set back in her career progression in her team. Asshole managers are everywhere.